Not necessarily, argues Kay McDonald on the basis of a recent OECD report:
While it is partly true in the industrial agricultural system that “food equals oil,” there are many other factors which affect food prices, including the definition of “food” used in making the comparison. Below, I’ve listed some of them.
- The dollar’s value compared to currencies of other food exporting and importing nations.
- Supply and demand.
- Amount of food used for biofuel production.
- Available infrastructure in transport and storage of food.
- The price of natural gas.
- Economic health of each nation.
- The amount of global meat consumption.
- Weather.
- Population growth.
- The percent of food wasted.
- Transport prices (not always the same as oil prices, as, for example, currently we have excess bulk shipping capacity which has lowered shipping rates).
- Government Ag policies and price support programs.
- Trade agreements.
- Geopolitics.
In her post, Kay also discusses how the OECD report finds no support for the claim that food price volatility has increased significantly over the last few years when compared to the last 50 years.
More generally, if you have any interest in food policy, Kay’s blog, Big Picture Agriculture, is a must-follow.
Spring Break Classic Posts: Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering
(It’s Spring Break here this week, so I am taking the week off from blogging to work to revise a few articles and begin working on new research projects. As a result, I am re-posting old posts that some new readers might have missed but which were very popular the first time I posted them. The following was initially posted on October 31, 2011.)
The seven billionth person on Earth will be born today according to the United Nations. To mark occasion, the BBC has developed an application that allows calculating your own number. I learned that, of all the people now alive, I was born 4,133,669,462nd.
As is inevitably the case when talking about the world’s population, the birth of the seven billionth person has caused a rash of newspaper articles, newscasts, and blog posts about how this really is a sign that at least two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — famine and death — will soon be here.
For a perfect example of that type of fear mongering, see this presentation, by Australian journalist Julian Cribb.
The Reverend’s New(est) Clothes
But really, Cribb is merely serving us the reheated leftovers of Reverend Thomas Malthus‘ Essay on the Principle of Population. In this book, first published in 1798, Malthus asserted that disease and famine would naturally arise to limit the size of any population.
Thus, because population growth would outpace agricultural growth (after all, there is only a limited amount of arable land in the world), disease and famine would take care of keeping the size of the population in check. Malthus actually estimated that the upper bound was equal to about one billion.